Defense spending and the recovery

Posted at 2:40 PM on June 8, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Economy

Apparently, this is "map day" on News Cut.

Vice President Joe Biden is out with another stimulus update, this time it's called "Roadmap to Recovery," that documents projects that have been funded to date.

The accompanying map -- above -- shows how heavily the Democrats' stimulus plan relies on military spending. They're the green dots. (Update: And, the Justice Department are also green dots. A News Cut reader with better ability to differentiate shades notes the projects may be directed to police departments)

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Comments (2)

After looking through the full document (thanks for the link), I think most of those green dots are actually the DoJ locations (the bottom entry in the legend). The DoD projects are a slightly different color.

Of course, if I'm reading things right, each of those dots may represent roughly one police officer funded in the given location, which isn't much of a stimulus....

Posted by Anton Rang | June 8, 2009 4:36 PM

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Some of these maps are rediculous in appearance as related to what is defined. For instance, maps depicting the geographic allocation of funds uses varying dot sizes as representing the amount of funding allocated to a particular recepient. This method could easily lead one to interpret the coverage of a dot as directly related to the area where money is being distributed, when, actually, the area covered by the dot is irrelevant. The use of a color spectrum would have assured relief from such ambiguity; I question the intent when choosing such a format.

Posted by Tyler Suter | June 8, 2009 4:48 PM

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